Why I Can’t Recommend Linux to Others

I agree with the overall sentiment in this article that I wouldn’t recommend Linux to others. A friend’s MacBook broke a couple of weeks ago, and since he knows about my journey from Apple hard- and software to Linux, he asked me if I’d recommend him moving to Linux as well—he didn’t and got a new MacBook instead.

For me, software distribution on Arch Linux through pacman feels better and more accessible than apt. When I tried Pop!_OS for a few days last year, fiddling with PPA/repositories left me irritated. I was missing a way of proper PPA discovery—except through common search engines, and most packages I wanted to install needed me to manually add their PPA/repository first (maybe this is something I’d get used to after a while…).

Even though one still needs an AUR helper (yay is my favorite), and some packages only come as AppImages or snaps, I don’t think that this is that much different from macOS where one typically also uses at least the AppStore and homebrew.

Working through the errors outdated packages throw or trying to figure out why a specific build fails for weeks is the more significant pain point for me with packages from the AUR.

I usually lack the time and energy to find out why the update from 1.8.5-1 to 1.8.6-1 for package aur/ios-webkit-debug-proxy failed.